


acquired agony

by youtiao



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Everybody Dies, Fae & Fairies, Gen, M/M, Manipulation, Mutilation, Serial Killers, morally corrupt and certainly insane yixing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:42:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26533069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youtiao/pseuds/youtiao
Summary: Did you know?Fae die after a week without their wings.
Relationships: Kim Jongdae | Chen/Zhang Yi Xing | Lay, Park Chanyeol/Zhang Yi Xing | Lay, Zhang Yi Xing | Lay-centric - Relationship
Comments: 12
Kudos: 26
Collections: Round 1 of Tales of the Lotus Fest





	acquired agony

**Author's Note:**

> title from kilmer - niru kajitsu  
> song on loop: villain - stella jang
> 
> CW: MURDER, mutilation (xing kills fae for their wings), stalking, mentioned suicide, manipulation, just general fucked-up

The first one, most unfortunately, is already dead. 

He had initially thought they were just asleep. He had thought—what a strange place to take a nap; in a ravine, rocky and dry. But the business of other fae and their sleeping patterns and choices mattered little to him, and Yixing carried on with his herb collecting. 

But the faery is still there when he passes by the rocky ravine the following week. He looks up, by chance, as he’s skidding down the side of the canyon, basket tucked under an arm and his wings spread for balance. He looks up, sees their prone body, and in his surprise, tumbles the remaining wing-lengths down the eroded sides of the canyon. 

He picks up his basket, straightens out his wings, dusts himself off. 

The faery is in the same position they were last week. On their back, gazing up at the sky. Arms crossed across their chest. 

Yixing looks closer. A perfect face. Straight brows, pale lips, slack and peaceful. Blank gold eyes. There’s a smudge of blood on their chin, as if someone had tried to wipe it away. Jet-black hair, gently swept away from their face, plaited and passed over one shoulder. 

When Yixing touches them, they’re cold. 

They’re soaked. A violent storm had passed by a few days prior, shutting Yixing into his home in the old oak. This cold faery’s clothes cling to their body, eyelashes clinging to their cheeks. The rain had washed the colour from their lips and skin, the tips of their ears going translucent. 

All that is left with colour are their wings, black like the night sky with bands of iridescent gold. They shimmer multicolours, moreso with the dew that had collected on them, pink and orange and blue-green. 

Yixing stands. And he stares. 

He kneels there, stares at this cold faery, and lifts the fragile, limp wing. It’s cold, slick, wet. Fae run hot. The wing is cold, yet the colour shines so brilliantly, shifting as Yixing turns his hand. 

Like wolves are hunted for their pelts, and beetles for their jewel-tone bodies, and deer for their curved horns; fae are hunted for their wings. Man’s vanity. To loot, to collect, to own all the beauties of the world. Nowhere else can one find something as magnificent, as heavenly, as otherworldly as a faery’s wing. 

Yixing hates humans. 

But, in that moment— 

Yixing thinks, he sort of understands those wretched humans. And their wretched greed. 

𓆤

And besides, 

the faery is already dead. 

𓆤

He buries the faery by the river. Murmurs a prayer and marks the grave with a sprig of lilac. 

He kneels in the wet. Washes mud off his hands and washes blood off the severed wings. 

He holds a wing up to his face, and the sun shines rainbow through it. 

𓆤

The second is asleep, as he thought the first to be. 

He stumbles into them in the dense thick of the forest, nearly stepping on them, despite their vivid yellow wings. In the evening dim, the faery seems to glow, like the lightning bugs faeries are said to have descended from. 

They’re beautiful. White is the colour of purity, and this little faery is swathed in it. Magnificent white horns branching from their head, tapering to deadly, sharp points. Ashy-blonde hair, curled, brushing the brow-bone. Flakes of glitter pressed into their cheeks—youthful vanity. So peaceful. So... tranquil. 

The faery is sound asleep. Yixing watches them for a long, long time, long enough for the sun to completely sink below the mountain and past. The little faery glows, lime and yellow, but they do not stir. 

They do not stir, even when Yixing turns them onto their front. Even when Yixing lays those yellow, teal, green wings flat, as he marvels at the size, at the heart-shape. The faery’s skin is hot, and their chest rises with every light, slumbering breath. 

It excites him. 

Heavens, they’re beautiful. In the moonlight and the glow of their own wings. The flutter of their eyelids, the part of their lips, the hair curled around the nape of their neck. 

He wonders: will the wings continue to glow, after he cuts them away? 

Quick, efficient. They’ve always said that the healer faery Yixing is quick and efficient. Steady hands. The healer faery Yixing has the steadiest hands in the South. He cuts away the faery’s glowing green wings quickly, efficiently, hands never wavering—and makes his escape. 

And so, he is many many many wing-lengths away when the little sleeping faery begins screaming. 

𓆤

There’s a knock on his door. He opens it. 

It’s a white-winged faery. White hair, stricken white eyes. “Please help them,” he chokes out. 

And draped over his shoulder is a faery. They’re pale, almost transparent in their extremities. Torso bound in bandages. White antlers, dry and cracked, one crumbling in half. It’s the little sleeping green-winged faery from a few nights ago, swathed in bandages instead of delicate cloth. Wingless. 

Because Yixing had their wings. Meticulously cleaned, tucked beneath his bed, along with the wings of the ravine faery. 

He takes the little faery into his home. Lays them onto his table. Watches as they fade away. 

“I’m sorry,” he tells the white-winged faery. Baekhyun, his name, he’s come to learn. The green is Lu Han. Beautiful names for a pair of beautiful faeries. Baekhyun and Lu Han. They are best friends. 

What a concept. 

He learns—every day, Lu Han had napped in that dense part of the forest. Every night, Baekhyun came to find and take them home. And _that_ night, Baekhyun had been late to pick them up—and he’d found his best friend, half-dead, still screaming. 

Yixing holds Baekhyun’s hand as he cries. 

“I’m so sorry,” he says. “There’s nothing I can do for them.” 

𓆤

The third is Baekhyun. 

Yixing lends him a room in his home, to rest, to heal. It is grief, body-wracking and soul-rending. It manifests as a scalding, persistent fever, and nightmares that tear through Yixing’s old oak home. He’s taken to sleeping in the branches, in the open air, so as to not be disturbed by Baekhyun’s grief. 

The next day, he carries Lu Han to the river. Buries him next to the ravine faery. Marks the grave with yellow chrysanthemum. He rinses the mud from his fingers, and murmurs a prayer. 

“Oh, how my lovely garden grows,” he says to himself, with a little smile. 

In the blink of an eye, it’s the changing of the seasons. Baekhyun heals, but it’s slow. He’s plagued with wonderful dreams of Lu Han, only to wake up to the nightmare of reality. And Yixing is a healer, of maladies of the body and maladies of the mind, so he changes Baekhyun’s headcloths when they become soaked with night-terrors’ sweat, and he presses food against Baekhyun’s lips so he doesn’t fade away, not just yet. He holds Baekhyun like Lu Han used to, strokes his wings like Lu Han used to. 

His wings. They’re like man’s treasure maps. Off-white with thin black stripes and edged with yellow, rough edges like worn paper. They’re thin, papery, only then does Yixing wonder how faery wings can support the weight of a faery in flight. 

Baekhyun heals. Baekhyun pokes his head out of the old oak on the first maytime blossomings, and gasps. Yixing brings meadow-flowers into the tree, and Baekhyun sits on a branch and makes crowns. 

“I didn’t know it had been this long,” he said, reaching up to put a crown on Yixing’s head. 

So spring comes. 

Baekhyun grows better, and spring passes into summer. “I ought to get out of your hair,” he begins to say. 

“You can stay as long as you like,” Yixing says. “I don’t mind the company.”

“No,” Baekhyun says, and he’s already looking to the future. “I need to move on.” 

That night, he cuts Baekhyun’s dinner with a potion of poisonous herbs, from young larkspur to monkshood to belladonna. The faery is half-paralysed in less than an hour, sobbing and vomiting, slurring “what is wrong with me” and “I’m sorry” over and over. 

He still finds the strength to apologise. How amusing. 

“Don’t fret, Baekhyun,” Yixing says, sweeping Baekhyun’s hair away from his forehead. “I’ll take care of you.” 

He slips a reed into Baekhyun’s mouth, and sits. He holds Baekhyun’s hand, rubbing his thumb over the knuckles. He watches as Baekhyun’s energy slips away, bit by bit, smiling tenderly as Baekhyun closes his eyes for the last time. 

And he watches as Baekhyun dies, map-wings falling lax. 

𓆤

He digs up Lu Han’s grave and lays Baekhyun beside them. Plants calla lily beside the mum. When he returns, months later, another body in his arms, the lily and chrysanthemum have twined together. 

𓆤

The fourth is Kyungsoo. He receives a letter from him, requesting a certain salve for wing tears. Yixing writes back, unsure if Southeastern medicines will work on Northern wings, though he assumes Kyungsoo has already set flight and will not see the response letter. So he prepares the salve anyway—perhaps Kyungsoo will find a way to modify it for Northern fae. 

They’re not _friends_ , but Yixing trades Kyungsoo his medical journals and medicines in exchange for plants and herbs from the North. 

It’s a... partnership. 

“Thanks for the medicines anyway,” Kyungsoo says, dipping a finger into the paste. “What happened to your hands?” 

His hands are covered in a rash. Unfortunate, but how else does one go about collecting belladonna? “Mistook deadly nightshade as blueberries,” he says, scratching his head sheepishly. 

“Ah, how troublesome,” Kyungsoo says, brows folding. “But I’d think _you_ of all people would know the difference between a sweet berry and a deadly plant, Xing.” 

“It was dark,” he replies, grinding the pestle more furiously. He knows it’s a weak excuse. He fixes a what-can-you-do smile onto his face and turns— 

“Yixing,” Kyungsoo says, “what did you do to Baekhyun?”

He’s holding up Baekhyun’s neatly severed wings. 

𓆤

Northern fae have feathered wings. They’re thicker and stronger than their Southeastern fae counterparts’. To deal with the blustery wind and snow, most likely. The worse the climate, the more strength it takes to fly. The worse the climate, the stronger, the thicker the wing. 

He hums as he sweeps tan feathers off his floor. He’d done his best to detach Kyungsoo’s wings neatly, but _heavens_ , those feathers got _everywhere_. 

Kyungsoo is draped over his table, still warm. 

“Real sorry for this, Soo,” he said, before he went for the pressure point at the side of his neck. And he debates, as he walks around the faery crumpled on the floor, how he should kill him. Kyungsoo’s eyes burns with hatred, betrayal—it just makes it _that_ much better.

“I have no choice,” he sings, swinging his knife to punctuate each word. Blood streaks off the shiny silver blade, splattering onto his clothes. 

“Just kill me already,” Kyungsoo whispers. He must be in unimaginable pain. Yixing laughs, laughs in his face, holds up Kyungsoo’s own severed wing for Kyungsoo to see. 

Kyungsoo’s wings are feathered. Uniform, grey-brown colouring, but edged with snowy white and black and berry red. Like a little winter scene. 

“Goodnight,” he croons, placing his hand on Kyungsoo’s back. 

He’s dead in the next instant. 

𓆤

Yixing plants deadly nightshade over his grave. It grows, grows, grows, until it’s taller than Yixing. He smiles tenderly at the plant. 

“What a spiteful faery,” he remarks. 

𓆤

The fifth is but a child. Yixing finds them cowering from the autumn thunders, using their orange wings as cover. 

“Oh, you poor thing,” he murmurs, draping his outer robe over the child, “let’s get you warm.” 

The child is barely conscious, and so, so thin. So cold. They settle into Yixing’s arms easily, pressing their face against his shoulder. Their wings are shiny, smooth, slick from the rain. 

It’s so easy. He almost laughs. 

Their name is Zitao, and humans had killed their parents a week prior, for their wings. Yixing can see why, if their parents’ wings were anywhere close to how perfect Zitao’s are. 

He tucks the child into bed, feeds them a juice of strawberry and winter cherry. 

By morning, the child faery Zitao is dead. 

𓆤

Atop the zinnias he plants over Zitao’s grave, a monarch butterfly lands. 

𓆤

His collection grows. His garden grows. “Good morning,” he says, stroking an oiled palm down the monarch butterfly wing. To his dismay, within a few days, the feathers of Kyungsoo’s wings had begun to bend and crack, and he’d had to discard them. He kept a few of the flight-feathers, tucked them into a jar. 

So he spends an hour every morning, tending to his collection. He can’t let them be _damaged_. 

That, simply, would not do. 

𓆤

The sixth one, he finds stooped in his herb patch. 

It’s been neglected since he picked up this hobby of his, but after a particularly terrible storm that will have certainly flooded and destroyed the humble little plot, he flies down to level it for good. Winter is coming—he’ll replant in the spring. 

And there he finds a faery. Matted grey-brown hair. Pale, thin, eyes sunken into their face. Dirt and blood streaked over their bare arms. Flat leaves plastered across a set of big, oozing wounds on their shoulder. _Leaves_. 

They make a half-growl, half-whimper as Yixing approaches. It’s probably meant to scare him away. But it’s pathetic, and they curl tighter in their ball. “Don’t,” they manage, like wind whispering through the trees. 

“You’re going to die if I don’t,” Yixing murmurs, picking them up. They’re so thin, so brittle, it makes Yixing feel sick. 

He draws them a bath. They pass out when Yixing begins washing their hair—turns out they have brilliant silver hair, not mud-coloured. He cleans out their wounds carefully, winces at the claw and bite marks over their shoulder. Some sort of predator must’ve gotten to them. 

Then he picks up their wing. 

The left is shredded. It can barely be considered a wing anymore—certainly can’t be flown with. He cleans off the scraps, wincing as they crumble in his fingers. 

He doesn’t touch the wing anymore, and sets the faery into a spare bed. 

He’ll ask when they wake up. 

𓆤

Their name is Xiumin, and they used to be a sprinter. Made to race, _bred_ to race, for the enjoyment of the rich. Humans. Like gladiator fights of the old, less bloody, but no less brutal. 

50 wins earned freedom. Xiumin was on their 49th, so fucking close—and then they’d been attacked by a fellow sprinter. Revenge, adrenaline, desperation; same thing. 

“Took five fae to get her off me, apparently,” Xiumin recounts. “I don’t remember.” 

And despite Xiumin’s handler’s soft spot for them, keeping a racer who couldn’t race was burning money. Nobody would sponsor a racer who couldn’t race. 

“I got my freedom in the end, right?” Xiumin laughs, shrugging one shoulder. Yixing doesn’t laugh, and Xiumin grows quiet. They stare at the blue crevices of Yixing’s oak in silence. 

“I’ll be dead soon, right?” 

Yixing stays silent. 

𓆤

Fae die after a while without their wings. If not killed by an opportunistic predator or blood loss first. They fade away, until they become a washed-out bone-white version of their former self. They suffer, night after night. Most kill themselves. 

𓆤

Xiumin dies on the balcony. In the days leading up, the only thing they request of Yixing is to help them to the window so they can look outside. A different window every day. “I never got to see things,” Xiumin told him, drowning in wistfulness. “Wasted my life away staring at cell walls or going so fast all I could see were blurs.” 

Fae die in a week without their wings. A faery’s wings are their life. They waste away, becoming weaker and weaker, because a vessel without wings is not a suitable vessel for the soul of a faery. 

Xiumin dies on the balcony, so there’s no answer when Yixing calls them for dinner. He walks outside to see the faery slumped over the railing. 

In the sunset, the remains of their black wings glow jewel-green. 

𓆤

Xiumin’s wings become dust. Suspended in the shape of tattered wings. A gust of wind would scatter it. And scatter it does, a breeze passing by as he returns into the house for a container. Outside the window, a cloud of scintillating dust, catching the sunset’s last light as they flutter. 

He catches some wing-dust in cupped hands. The particles are small, so small they flow like water between his fingers. Black, like ash, turning green when he turns his hands this way and that. 

Gentle, he tips his palmful into his glass jar. 

𓆤

The seventh is a beautiful, beautiful, glass-wing. 

His name is Kai. He first sees Kai frolicking in a pond, holding hands with a faery of dust-brown wings. Kai—though Yixing doesn’t know his name at the time—had deep black hair, while his friend had white-blond. It struck an odd picture. 

_I must have this one_ , he thinks. 

The next day he learns this glasswing’s name. “Kai, noooo,” his friend giggles as they’re splashed with pond water. Scum drips from their white hair. He’s seated in the branches of willow that overlook this pond, making baskets, watching, just watching. 

“Kai,” he mouths. _What a lovely name_. He smiles, and the half-finished basket crumbles to pieces in his hands. 

And he waits. 

He doesn’t _just_ want Kai’s wings. No, he’s been too crude. He needs to know more. He needs to learn more. He needs more, more, _more_. How long, exactly, do fae last without wings? How do fae feel pain? How do fae writhe, how do they cry, when their wings are ripped out from the root? 

If only he’d kept Zitao around. Tch. 

Yixing likes beautiful things. And Kai is just so _beautiful_. It’s not a pain to wait. 

His opportunity comes not a week, not a month, but a year later. He’s been patient. And one summer afternoon, Kai walks into the clearing alone, wings taut behind him. 

Oh? 

He puts his foot through their carefully-stacked piles of pretty rocks. He paces the beach, back and forth, back and forth. Six rounds of back and forth before Kai goes storming down the waterside. 

Of course Yixing slips off the tree and follows. He floats on behind. He could take Kai now, when he’s preoccupied with his resentment, but— 

What’s the fun in that? 

He almost chokes in his excitement. Ah, God. Oh, God. His blood sings in his excitement. He’ll have Kai, and he’ll have those gorgeous wings, and he’ll get to _experiment_. He’ll get to do whatever he wants. 

Oh, he can’t wait. 

With one more flap of his wings, he’s right behind Kai. He’s been _so_ patient already. A little impatience, as a treat. A _year!_ He’s going to have 

so

much 

fun! 

Kai whirls around, panic flooding his expression. 

“Hello, beautiful,” he says. He can’t hold back his manic laugh. 

𓆤

When Kai wakes up, he’s already struggling. 

Oh, what a tenacious faery. His wings twitch, eyelids twitch, and then he’s wide-eyed and thrashing. It’s not like he can go anywhere, not when Yixing’s own magic holds him in place, but it’s admirable. What a lovely, lively pet he has. 

He re-enters the room, holding a reed and glass. Kai’s head whips toward him. “Ah—! Faer, please h...” 

He trails off. 

Yixing smiles. Rolls up his sleeves. 

A scream rings out from between the roots of the old oak. 

“You poor thing,” he remarks, jotting down notes. “In for a _world_ of pain.” 

𓆤

By the end, the seventh is begging to die. 

𓆤

His seventh pair is perfect. Glass wings. He _marvels_ at them, swinging his legs as he rubs his thumb over the smoothly sanded-down root. 

Perfect. 

By the river, a freshly-planted _lily of the valley_ quivers. 

𓆤

As a final amusement, he goes down to the lake. The dust faery Taemin sits by the shore, pale, though their wings are still surely attached to their back. Yixing doesn’t want _boring_ wings. 

“Where did you go...” they mutter. So caught up in it they don’t even notice Yixing in the brush. 

A day later, Yixing finds them bawling, clutching the cut of bloodied hair to their face. “I’m sorry,” they choke, holding the plait gingerly, carefully, even as they sob. “I’m so sorry, Jongin!” 

How funny. Kai had whispered the same, as he lay dying. 

𓆤

The eighth bursts through the door, shouting. The sun is rising, and Yixing’s seated in the kitchen, wing in hand, cloth in the other. 

Surprise quickly turns to annoyance—he’s still going over his notes from his experiments on Kai. He’ll have to get rid of them, but he doesn’t _need_ another and he doesn’t _want_ ano— 

Then he sees the intruder properly. 

They’re small—which isn’t much to note on its own, except their milky-blue wings are _large_ , larger than they are, and lightly _furred_ —oh, how _wondrous_. Yixing is so enthralled he doesn’t notice the faery staring at him, the most _stricken_ expression on his face. 

“S... Why do you have Sehun’s wing?” he croaks. “Why...”

Yixing tilts his head. “Sehun?” 

The intruder stares, stares, stares at the sets of wings on his table. Stares at the _ravine faery_ ’s wings. 

Ah, so that’s how it is.

Ravine faery is this unfortunate soul’s friend. How unfortunate, for them to find out their friend’s fate right as they themselves succumb to the same fate, too, becoming one of the treasures in Yixing’s collection. 

“Sehun, was it?” Yixing muses. His first pair of wings. He brings it to his cheek, strokes the thin glittering band. “They’re dead. Unfortunately. They seemed like quite the gorgeous one, when I found them in that ravine.” 

The intruder stares at the floor. 

“I know,” they say. Their wings flutter behind them. Nerves, or anger? Yixing cares little for the feelings of other fae—he resumes cleaning the wing, face tilted toward the intruder. 

“I know Sehun’s dead,” he says. “I was the one who killed them.” 

𓆤

The intruder falls to his knees and cries, shoulder-shaking gut-wrenching sobs. 

“You poor thing,” Yixing says. He smiles, running a hand down the shaking shoulder of the murderer, holding their victim’s wings in the other hand. “This must’ve weighed heavily on your heart.” 

They sob and sob and sob. “Sehun, I’m sorry,” they sob. It grates on Yixing’s ears—fae are not meant to be emotional. Fae are elegant and beautiful and cold. He shakes his head, gathers up his wings, and slips into his chambers, needing to clear his head and figure out what he is to do. 

𓆤

When he returns, he finds his work has been done for him—plunged deep into the faery’s chest are all Yixing’s knives. Blood pooling on the floor. There’s a smile on his face. 

It’s unnerving. 

But their wings are gorgeous, and Yixing likes gorgeous things. 

𓆤

“From one killer to another,” he adds to his parting prayer, “I hope your journey to hell is untroubled.” 

He turns his face to the sky as it begins to rain. 

“Neither of us are going to heaven, that’s for sure.” 

𓆤

The ninth is a little performer faery. 

Every ten summers, a fae-traveling-band passes through. They arrive two nights after the irises begin to bloom, filling meadows with violet, and Yixing brings a basket of these flowers as welcome. When you live forever, the smallest things become _tradition_. 

“Hey, Minghao,” he says, setting down in the middle of the clearing. 

The dancer pokes his head out of a tent. “Xing!” he responds, brushing his hands off on his tunic. He brings the basket of irises to his face, sniffing deeply. 

And then he sees them. The troupe rarely gets new members, so he notices them immediately. Their hair is tied up neatly, perfectly round spectacles sit on their nose, and they’re helping unpack the stage. They kneel in the dirt, smiling radiantly up at Yunho. 

“Who’s that?” he asks. 

“Ah, you haven’t met Chanyeol yet!” Minghao grins. He takes Yixing by the hand, drags him toward the new one. “Chanyeol! I want you to meet someone!” he sings, skipping toward the faery— _Chanyeol_ —with Yixing in tow. 

Chanyeol smiles at Yixing, and. 

Well. 

“Hello,” they say. Their voice is surprisingly deep. They brush the dirt off their tunic and stand. “I’m Chanyeol,” they say, and Yixing is already tumbling, head over heels. 

They’re not little at all, towering over him, even with shoulders slouched. They’ve a pair of long, iridescent wings, to fit their slender, gorgeously tall frame. In the afternoon sunlight, the vibrant blue-green seems to glow. 

𓆤

The ninth is his favourite. 

The evening of their arrival, the troupe performs. Yixing’s too busy making deliveries to watch. They’re still going after he’s done, so he settles down on a branch with a dish of fruit-wine, and makes conversation as he watches Minghao dive through a ring of fire. 

Chanyeol saunters out from behind the filmy curtain, and Yixing’s breath catches in his throat. 

They’re completely different. It might be the wine or the hot summer night, but they’re even more gorgeous than before, hair loose, head thrown back, skin shining in the light of the firebugs. Hands flying over the strangest instrument Yixing has ever seen. 

“Real gorgeous, that one,” someone comments. Yixing laughs in agreement. 

The ninth’s name is _Chanyeol_. 

𓆤

During the day, Chanyeol sings to children, the ones too young to stay up into the early hours of the morning. They sit cross-legged on a stump as they strum the strings of their strange instrument, singing about their adventures to the children sitting before them. Yixing smiles as he passes, but he passes quickly, and doesn’t notice this faery’s stutter, the way they stare at his back as he walks. 

𓆤

They show up by his table, glistening with sweat. “Hello,” the faery says. There’s a smile in his words, in his cheeks. “I was wondering if I could share a drink?” 

Ah, so this is how it is. Yixing smiles, amused. “Sure,” he says, patting the branch beside him. The faery seems surprised by this, eyes going wide. “What’s wrong, little fae? I do have time. Were you asking without expecting a yes?” 

At the faery’s enthused “no!”, he laughs. 

He cracks open the seal on the jar. “Well, sit down then. I’m Yixing.” 

𓆤

The summer passes like honey, dripping through his fingers. He’s not in a hurry to desecrate circus-summers, for how rarely they come, and he’s a little too addicted to the image of Chanyeol singing to douse that flame yet. 

Oh, he’s gone soft. 

Chanyeol shows up on his doorstep with flowers tucked behind their back. They’re still not little at all. They still bump their curly blonde head on the top of Yixing’s door. 

“Hi,” Chanyeol says. Their cheeks are flushed. “Can I come in?” 

Dread gnaws at the pit of Yixing’s stomach. He’s gone soft, like butter, and butter melts in the sun. He opens the door anyway, lets Chanyeol in anyway, loops his arms around Chanyeol’s neck and kisses him, anyway. 

“We’re leaving today,” Chanyeol says, standing on the branch—their branch, overlooking the circus’ little clearing. “I’m really happy you said yes, Yixing-ge. I don’t want to live with regrets.” 

It’s heavy. Too heavy. Yixing stays silent, and watches as they load their circus tents into their bags. 

“Stay,” he says, suddenly. 

Chanyeol turns wide eyes on him. 

“Stay here,” Yixing whispers. 

𓆤

“Stay here with me,” he breathes, as he cuts iridescent-green wings from his little performer’s back. “Stay,” 

“ _Forever_.”

𓆤

Summer comes to a close. The irises wilt. He kneels before the fresh earth by the burbling brook, and clasps his hands, whispers a prayer, over freshly planted roses. 

𓆤

The tenth is a wanderer faery who knocks on Yixing’s door blue and limping. 

It can’t even be called a _knock_ —the faery collapses against the door, and Yixing’s woken up by the _thump_. He opens the door to a faery sprawled out over his step. Underneath a thick cloak peek scaled black wings. 

A _dragon_ -faery. They’re rarer than rare. They take hundreds of years to mature, and most are picked off before they even hatch. 

Back when they were abundant, ruling over lands with iron fists and sharp scaled wings, it was fine. But now, passes hundreds, thousands, hundred-thousand years before one is seen. Killed by their own nature. 

As he drains the life from the wanderer faery, he feels a tinge of regret. 

_Perhaps this is the last one_ , he thinks, cradling the wanderer’s head in his lap. Stroking his rain-damp hair. Stroking his scaled wings. Like a lover. 

How old is this one? 800 years? 1500? He doesn’t know. Will he ever know? 

But it’s only a tinge. After the body goes cold and heavy in his lap, he gets up. _Thump_ , goes their head, on the floor. 

He feels cold and heavy. 

It’s no _fun_ when they don’t struggle. 

𓆤

The eleventh is the last. 

He’s patting the dirt into place around the stalks of the snapdragons when he sees him. Standing on the other side of the river. No wings, but he doesn’t look human. He’s bursting at the seams with power, but he’s slim, small. There’s a taste like blood in his teeth. 

Yixing waves. The not-faery smiles. 

And then he’s gone. 

𓆤

The next time Yixing sees him, he’s standing on one of his old oak’s branches. Tailed wings spread wide, how one holds their wings when in flight. He’s not in flight though, simply standing, watching Yixing. 

He’s beautiful. Sharp cheekbones, sharp eyes. Deep black wings with psychedelic rainbow markings. The patterns seem to twist and warp in the sunlight. _He_ seems to twist and warp in the sunlight. 

Yixing wonders, is he going crazy? 

But he smiles, waves. The faery doesn’t smile back, though, so Yixing drops his hand. 

When he next looks up, the faery is gone. 

𓆤

He dreams of blackness. He dreams of kaleidoscopes of red, green, blue. He dreams of dripping blood, those wings in his hands, he dreams of a hand around his throat. He dreams of his own flower-petal wings being plucked from his back, like one plucks the petals of an ox-eye daisy. 

He’s killing someone, maybe you’re killing someone, maybe he’s killing you, maybe you’re killing him, maybe... 

𓆤

He’d stepped out for a moment. Just a moment, to get his paring knife from his box, to rub cream into his palms. The dragon-faery’s scales had begun to come loose—and unfortunately, all books on dragon-fae were children’s myths. 

“No wonder you smell like death,” comes a voice from his workroom. 

He stands before the table, before Yixing’s prized collection. It’s the faery with the rainbow wings, but his back is smooth and wingless. He picks a pair up—Zitao’s—turning it over, gentle as he does. 

“You’re one sick faery,” he comments wryly. 

“‘suppose so,” Yixing responds, leaning against the wall. “You are too, for assuming those are real.” 

The faery holds the wing up to his eye. The sunlight that streams through is orange. “But these aren’t fake.” He cocks his head, smiling a smileless smile. It’s a twist of the lips. “Am I right? You stink of blood.” 

“I _am_ a doctor, faer. I’ve seen more death and blood than the average fae.” 

The faery sighs. He places the wing down, presses his fingers together. He pulses with light, so quick and fast Yixing isn’t sure it even happened. A trick of the eye? He turns deep, prismatic eyes onto Yixing, and panic, a little worm in his chest, begins to writhe. 

With the sound of rubbing waxy leaves, wings unfurl from his back. 

Both of Yixing’s eyebrows rise. “I didn’t know there were still living halflings.” 

Halflings are children of humans and fae. The lucky ones that do not get consumed by their own magic, blood boiling and skin rippling. They’re the lucky ones that do not get shunned and killed by loathsome, fearful humans. If a halfling matures, they’re endlessly powerful. Changing forms with a thought. They were the dragons and the glass-wings and the twisting serpents of the sea. 

They’re myths. Humans don’t even believe in gods now. 

“Regrettably, we are hardy motherfuckers,” the halfling sighs. He pulls out a knife, and it clicks into place in his delicate fingers. “Well, wing-stealer? Don’t you want my wings?” 

𓆤

Yixing does. Very much. He’s seeing through rose-tinted spectacles, through star-shaped pupils. The snake in his chest curls around his heart, around his core, and the snake is greedy. 

𓆤

Yixing escapes with half a wing. That half a wing costs him shattered arms and a multitude of stab wounds to the chest. There’s most definitely blood in his lungs. He can’t see out of one eye, and his whole body aches, from exertion or from injuries? He doesn’t know, at this point. 

The halfling fled as soon as Yixing severed half his wing. He wonders—do the same rules apply to the gods of the fae? Will the halfling be dead in a week? How horrific to find him—a dead faery, with half his wing gone. 

Yixing coughs, and blood sprays over his front. 

Shit, _he’ll_ be dead in a week if he doesn’t fix himself up. He gets to his feet, and stumbles to the river. 

𓆤

Fix himself he does. As well as he can. He passes out in his workroom for three days, and he can’t stand for more than a few minutes before his chest begins to ache, and his hands shake uncontrollably. 

He barks out a laugh. He’s done for. A doctor who can’t see, a doctor who can’t stand, a doctor whose hands shake. He can’t even muster up the strength to grind herbs. 

He gets an errand-boy to write and deliver letters to his patients. 

And then he sits in his room. Ignores the frantic knocks at his door. Ignores the people calling “ _doctor, why_ ”. 

His wings are intact, but he’s as good as dead. 

𓆤

He dreams of hands at his throat. He wakes to hands at his throat, to iridescent eyes glaring down at him in the dark. A wing and a half, blacker than the night. No light, so no rainbows. 

“Die,” seethes the shifter. His hands are like a vice around Yixing’s neck, pressing his thumbs into his windpipe. His vision is flashing white, fading around the edges. Then he lets go, and the air that flows into his lungs is so, so sweet. 

And then he’s being pressed into the floor. It’s worse now, gasping thinly, his face being crushed to the hard wooden floor. He can’t breathe, much less get a word out, but he twists his head and click, the glint of a knife. 

This is karma, isn’t it? 

Silent, the shifter stabs the knife into his back. Again. Again. He counts, three, four, ten, twenty, one-hundred, two-hundred. By then, he doesn’t even feel pain, no more than he already feels. Just sensation. The sensation of the knife plunging in, pulling out. 

He’s breathing blood now. Copper in his teeth, like chewing on the shiny stones in the river. Three-hundred, and the shifter’s hand drops to his side. 

It’s over. 

Is it? 

It’s not. The shifter drops the knife, and tears Yixing’s wings from his back. Slowly, excruciatingly. He didn’t think he could feel worse pain, and he chokes on his scream and the blood from his lungs. 

_This_ is karma. 

God’s judgement for his crimes.

𓆤

From the tattered remains of the healer’s body, Jongdae plucks a golden core. It’s clean, and pure, unlike it’s owner. The little thing pulses in his palm, with the guttural breathing of the faery lying at his feet. He clenches his fist, and the core fades. 

He tosses the wings to the side, and sits down heavily against the wall. 

What a terrible place to die. 

He had hoped he could drag his battered body to the riverbank, where the healer buried his victims, but he’s so tired. 


End file.
